Tubal shoved Lassite away. “What use are you then, if you cannot give me that secret?” he growled. “Very well, let me demonstrate the manner in which you will die.”

Lassite managed to straighten himself and sit up again, but he still kept his head bent and did not meet Tubal’s eyes. Someday he would betray Niko, but it was not today.

When Turo beckoned for Atlanta, she was prepared, she thought. But seeing him in the doorway turned her stomach to ice.

She trailed him along the corridor. Two drones followed behind at eye level, one on either side. Atlanta could hear the whine of their motors, and the click when one’s lens ratcheted from one point to another. The faint breeze of their motors like someone hovering behind her, menacing her silently, stirred the hairs on the back of her neck.

The halls were unoccupied, as though they might have been cleared beforehand. They were plain white plastic, dingy with age, and metal flooring underfoot that looked as though it had been salvaged from other ships, sometimes marked with colored lines that led nowhere or ended abruptly or changed into some other color.

Their footsteps rang faintly on the middle flooring, Turo’s booted heels a definite and sure-sounding rhythm, her own bare feet creating a muted counterpoint.

Turo did not speak, nor did she.

She wondered what Tubal Last planned to show her.

This time the pirate chieftain was not in his cluttered throne room, nor was Petalia with him. He was in a large environmental chamber, one that had been shaped into a garden. The round room was some sixty meters in diameter, and high ceilinged, with sunlamps set in that ceiling.

Atlanta and Turo had entered through a normal door, which closed behind them. Atlanta glanced back and found it difficult to see; ivy flowed down over the wall to conceal the portal, as it did over most of the walls, giving way at the top to the blue-painted ceiling where the sunlamps were affixed. Filmy screens cut in the amorphous shapes of clouds flitted past at intervals, casting shoals of shadows.

She did not recognize the vegetation, and much like the throne room, it seemed an odd medley, fruits and flowers from dozens of worlds. A handful coexisted less easily than others, drooping or shriveled in their containers, but most appeared healthy, some even thriving.

Two large archways led to similar rooms; she could hear water splashing from the one to her right and glimpsed more greenery through both spaces.